


Stopclock

by horatioa (Oureias)



Category: Newsies - All Media Types, Newsies!: the Musical - Fierstein/Menken
Genre: Depression, Executive Dysfunction, Gen, and 3k of self indulgent bullshit, and Crutchie being a good supportive bro, lmao i had a couple of hard days so here's Jack, mental health, uhh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-30
Updated: 2018-11-30
Packaged: 2019-09-02 10:34:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16785229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oureias/pseuds/horatioa
Summary: Jack doesn't make it downstairs to sell papes, so Crutchie bites his tongue, hefts himself to his feet, and goes up the stairs after his brother.





	Stopclock

Jack was late to sell papes again.

Crutchie shrugged off Les’ tugging hand with some excuse about how Jackie must be off at the Sun, mooning around Kath and picking up his papers over there, but he exchanged a troubled glance with Specs over the kid’s head.

There were very few reasons why Jack would be late.

Davey grabbed his brother’s hand, filling their packs full of papers, and stood around for another long minute, retying his shoe and fidgeting with the clasp of his bag, but Jack never showed.

“He got us up this morning,” Specs said as soon as they left, looking at the empty spot where Jack usually riffled through his papers to find a story.

“He got Racer up,” Crutchie corrected. It had been wet, too wet for him to chance the ladder up to the penthouse, so he hadn’t actually seen Jack since last night. He bit his lip. Jack had seemed just fine. He shrugged, putting on an utterly calm face for the other newsboy. “Probably just swanning about in the showers.”

He heaved himself to his feet, suddenly bitterly wishing that he’d waited to buy papes.

“I’ll go tell him to knock off using up the hot water.”

Specs’ eyebrow rose ever so slightly.

“I can—”

“It’s fine,” Crutchie cut off, lifting his chin slightly. “Go keep an eye on Romeo. I’ll get you if I need to.”

“No news is good news,” Specs reiterated, then shook his head like he was flinging soap from his ears. “If he _is_ using all the water,” he said, “soak him for me.” Crutchie took that for what it was.

He sold four papes on his way back, not bad for making it only about three blocks, and stopped for a minute outside the House. A breath hissed through his nose at the sight of the thick wooden staircase opening onto the front.

Dammit, Jack. Why did he have to live on the top floor?

Well, Crutchie knew why, but that didn’t mean he always had to be happy about it.

He took it one flight at a time, pausing to roll his hip and take a breather when he needed to, but it still took an embarrassingly long time to get himself up to the roof. At each floor, he called out Jack’s name, but he already knew that Jack would be up top.

He ducked out the window and adjusted his grip on his crutch, hooking his dead foot through the ladder rungs so that even if he slipped, he wouldn’t fall immediately. It was achingly slow and he tried very hard not to wish that Jack would lend him a hand. He finally made it to the top with a twinging knee and a strong desire to go back to bed.

Sure enough. Striped undershirt and slacks, one suspender hanging off his shoulder like he’d gotten lost in the middle of putting it on, sitting with his back against the railing and his feet stretched out on the grating. There was absolutely no movement from him.

Crutchie sighed. “Jack.”

The other boy didn’t respond, just stared off at the skyline.

“Jack.” He didn’t want to startle him. His head turned vaguely to the left.

“Hmm? Oh, hey.”

That was it. He didn’t say anything else. Crutchie breathed surreptitiously through his nose but Jack smelled clean, neither like alcohol nor charcoal, which would have been the worst and best case scenarios respectively.

“D'you even make it downstairs this morning?”

Jack raised a hand to scratch at the edge of his eyebrow, then let it drop back into his lap with a thunk.

“Nah,” he said. “I just sat down and—” his throat worked for a second. “I’m still here.”

“You have breakfast?”

Jack shook his head slightly. “Not hungry.”

Crutchie looked at him a minute and then eased himself to the grating next to him, stretching his legs out to match Jack’s, biting his lip at how cold the metal was. Had Jack been sitting straight on it all night?

“Did you eat yesterday?”

There was a pause and Crutchie closed his eyes. That was a no, then. But he’d sworn Jack had gone to bed laughing.

“Sorry, Crutch,” Jack said softly. “You don’t have to stay.” His pointer finger was trembling at intermittent moments, shivering tendons up the back of his hand. Crutchie knocked the side of his shoe into Jack’s ankle.

“I’d rather not take my chances on the ladder, thanks,” he said primly, doing a pitch-perfect impersonation of Katherine’s snootiest voice. It almost made Jack smile. Crutchie swallowed. He’d seen Jack in every mood under the sun, but this one always scared him the worst. A vacantly pleasant boy who wouldn’t really care if you cut his hand off was not a Jack that he recognized.

He didn’t know how to interact with this version of his friend.

Jack was there for him on Pain Days, even when there was nothing really to do but heat compresses and distract him. Crutchie didn’t think putting a hot washcloth on Jack’s head would help at all, but the distraction might.

“You wanna see today’s pape?” He fished one out of his bag with a small bit of effort, opening it to read the front page spread.

“There’s gonna be a war in South Africa,” he announced. “Look, all those English journalists are running away.” He swept his eyes over to see that Jack was looking, but emptily, like the words weren’t words at all but some strange foreign symbols. Crutchie was suddenly convinced that Jack had forgotten how to read.

“Why you sellin’ the Sun?”

Crutchie’s eyes returned to the paper. “Cause the office was closer than the World.”

“Ain’t that something,” Jack said, and didn’t elaborate.

“Jesse Barnes scared a church in Kentucky. You ‘member? He killed his wife last year. Says here he danced on the Bible.”

“Good for him,” Jack muttered, and Crutchie actually took a double take.

“You don’t gotta be mean about it.”

Jack’s chin tilted up, pressing the back of his head more firmly against the cold railing. “I’ll stop when they do.”

Crutchie shook his head. Alright. Good to know. Jack’s hatred of Catholicism was stronger than whatever was going on in his brain. Maybe if Crutchie set fire to the Pope, he’d even laugh. Now wouldn’t that be a headline. He let himself daydream it for a second. He searched the page.

“There’s a whole column for the Dreyfus trial, again.” Crutchie scrunched up his nose. “I think he’s innocent.”

Something like a grin flickered at the barest edges of Jack’s face, gone faster than lightning, but Crutchie’s heart still seized on it like a lifeline. “Course you do,” Jack said. “You’re you.”

Crutchie rolled his shoulders in a loose shrug.

“Storm yesterday exploded a dance hall,” Crutchie quoted, “‘several women fainted and some became hysterical.’” Jack didn’t seem inclined to comment. “Kath woulda yelled at the storm until it stopped,” he continued, hoping to provoke some kind of a rise out of his friend. Nothing. “Ah, maybe it's good she wasn’t there. She’d’ve been late for work.”

That seemed to hit a chord. Crutchie felt a change in the way Jack was holding himself, slightly more of a hunch folding over his shoulders, though he really didn’t move at all. He waited, letting the newspaper slowly fall down in his hands until it was back in its display fold.

“Crutch?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t like being useless,” Jack said. His ring finger scraped idly at his other palm.

“No one does.”

“I ain’t doing my job.”

“It’s okay,” Crutchie ventured. “You can afford a day off.” Privately, he thought that Jack had enough money saved up to take a whole year off without going hungry —he had a _ten dollar bill_ — but that thought didn’t exactly seem conducive to the whole stuck-on-the-roof issue.

“Not that job.”

“Oh, everyone set out alright,” Crutchie said. “Even Davey and Les, though they’re still kinda getting into the swing of it.” Jack’s eyes closed lightly at the mention of Davey’s name and Crutchie bit his tongue. Jack’s eyes stayed closed, like it was too much effort to open them again. Somewhere across the city skyline, a plume of white smoke spewed into the air, catching like a bright flag in the morning light. Jack might have liked to draw that, Crutchie thought, but when he looked over, Jack’s eyes were still shut. For a brief moment he thought Jack might have fallen asleep, but the rise and fall of his chest was too measured and controlled for that. He was awake, even if he wished he wasn’t. Crutchie sniffed, changing the balance of weight on his seat. He flinched as his skin hit new, cold, metal.

“Specs told me to soak you if you were wasting the hot showers.”

“Showered yesterday,” Jack said. “‘M clean enough.”

Crutchie licked his lips and jabbed Jack with his elbow, harder than he’d initially meant to. “I mean, says you.”

Jack didn’t respond.

Crutchie twisted his head to the right, looking off in the direction of Jack’s bedroll. It was untouched, neatly made with a precision that Crutchie knew his friend wasn’t capable of that morning. Jack hadn’t eaten. Jack hadn’t slept.

He’d said once that Snyder had knocked something loose inside him, some spring or cog bent out of place, lost and left behind in the floorboards of the Refuge. He’d said it laughing, hanging upside down from the bannister of the main staircase, and then he’d fallen on his face when a passing Albert had heaved his feet over the edge, but Crutchie remembered because Jack’s eyes had been dead serious.

Jack’s clock worked all the time, except for twice a day.

It had been a long while since he’d last stopped ticking, though.

His hands moved, twisting his fingers together with enough force that Crutchie felt alarmed they would break, but they dropped back into his lap a second before he interfered.

“Jack,” Crutchie asked. “What can I do?”

“If you tell me to do something,” he said listlessly, “I’ll probably do it.”

His mouth soured. Had Snyder knocked that loose too?

“I ain’t gonna order you around.”

Jack suddenly slammed the back of his head into the railing, the shake of the sound reverberating all along the fire escape. Crutchie yelped.

“Some fucking leader I am,” Jack said, finally breaking from the careful monotone he’d been holding since Crutchie arrived. This voice was three quarters of the way to anger. It vanished as quickly as it appeared. “Better off when I’m gone.”

Crutchie froze. Images of Santa Fe and the Refuge flooded his head.

“Gone?”

Jack’s palm rotated lazily on his wrist, inscribing a slow circle in the air.

“Workin’ in an office.”

Oh. Oh. Crutchie closed his eyes, struggling to remember what had happened while he’d been under Snyder’s tender care. It felt like he’d been released into an alternate universe. A Jack who didn’t want to go to Santa Fe. A Race who wasn’t speaking to Spot. Romeo with almost-dimmed eyes. He guessed he was different too, but he didn’t feel it.

He felt absolutely, totally, completely, convincingly fine.

Jack’s eyes slipped closed again and Crutchie took the moment to center himself, rubbing his thumb across the polished wood of his crutch, worn smooth where he gripped it, the faintest beginnings of finger grooves appearing in the wood. He didn’t resent it for the stripes left on his ribs.

“You can’t go to bed, Jack,” he said. He coughed, his voice coming out stronger. “It ain’t even 8:00 am.”

“Sleepin’ in,” Jack proposed.

A fat pigeon flew in a wide circle above the fire escape, the city beginning to thrive in earnest as all the late-comers stepped out their doors. It landed on the far corner and began to preen. The thick black collar around its neck glittered in the light. Crutchie’s paperbag pressed into his lap.

So he lost 25 cents today. No biggie. September was plenty warm to be sleeping outside. As Jack was clearly aware.

But when Crutchie looked over, Jack’s shoulders were too tight for sleep. He dropped his eyes to look through the grating at the network of metal stretching down to the street below. Sleeping all day was infinitely preferable to stewing in self-loathing.

“Hey,” he said.

Jack stayed absolutely motionless, but his eyelids jumped, like he was trying to look at Crutchie without opening them. “Hey,” he tried again, grabbing Jack’s arm. The other boy inhaled stiffly, startled but too suppressed to jump, and his eyes slowly opened. “What if you was me?”

Jack blinked.

“What?” He sounded exhausted, like that one word had taken all the energy he had left.

“What if it was me who couldn’t get up?”

“That’s diff—”

“Why?”

Jack paused.

“What if it were Specs? Or Racer?”

The tiniest scoff left Jack’s mouth, as if the idea of Racetrack Higgins sitting still was any more impossible than watching Jack Kelly fall to pieces on a fire escape.

“Davey, then,” Crutchie tried.

“Davey’s too smart for this,” Jack mumbled. His eyes fixed somewhere out above the far railing, watching thin clouds scud by in ribbons. Crutchie watched too, but dropped his eyes when the monotony became oppressive.

“But pretend,” he pushed after a minute. “What would you tell Davey?”

Jack exhaled, a sigh on ten percent power.

“Go home,” he said. “Sleep it off. Try again tomorrow.”

“Then what’s different for you?”

“I ain’t Davey.”

Crutchie scrubbed his hand across his face. “Well sure.” Had Jack always been this frustrating? If you dug past all the layers of bravado, was this all that was behind the famous Jack Kelly? He shook his head like a dog clearing water. No. That wasn’t kind. More importantly, it wasn’t true. He took a breath.

“What’s the difference?”

Jack’s head lolled slightly, turning just enough to give Crutchie a semi-level stare.

“Like I said,” he repeated tiredly, “Davey’s too smart for this.”

Crutchie bit his tongue.

“Not sure bein’ smart’s got anything to do with it,” he said. He tapped his crutch on the metal grating to produce a sound they both knew real well. “I think it’s like this,” he said, then rapped his knuckles lightly just above Jack’s eyebrows, “but in there.”

“Hey,” Jack said. He didn’t continue. Crutchie looked over and saw that his friend’s eyes were open, but sightless, like he was somewhere far away from a sun drenched fire escape fifty feet above the Lower East Side.

“Jackie?”

“How much?” Jack asked. “How much more does he want from me?” His chest was moving quickly, but lightly, like only the shallowest layer of his lungs were hyperventilating.

Crutchie stayed quiet. That wasn’t really a question that had an answer. Even as young as he’d been, realizing he’d never run again hadn’t exactly been a walk in the park. The side of his mouth twisted tight.

“You’re still you, Jack,” he said. “You just… y’gotta take things slow sometimes.”

The clang of Jack’s skull hitting the metal railing came again, but softer, more like he was trying to prove where he was rather than hurt himself. He stamped down on a flash of irritation. Jack was totally fine 350 days a year.

“Sorry,” Jack mumbled and Crutchie’s irritation instantly turned on himself. He nudged the back of Jack’s hand with his own and then yanked his fingers away.

“Jesus,” he said. “You wanna apologize, put a blanket on, you’re freezing.”

Jack didn’t move.

“That an order, Crutch?”

Crutchie inhaled sharply, but when he looked at his friend's face there was the ghost of a smile tracing around his lips. Even at rock bottom, Jack Kelly was a little shit. He shoved an elbow into Jack’s ribs and was rewarded with a rolled shoulder and a slight squawk.

“Pity party ain’t gonna fix anythin’,” he said kindly. “Trust me.”

The smile dropped like a stone.

“I can’t sell today,” Jack said. His hands were shaking again, none of the artist’s steadiness left. “And I don’t—” He trailed off but Crutchie knew. Don’t want anyone to see. Don’t want to look weak. Don’t want to fail. Jack’s teeth sunk into his lip, worrying it almost to the point of blood.

He made the elective decision not to inform Jack that most of the House was just as aware of his problems as they were of Crutchie’s. Which was to say, intimately. When you had twenty people all living in one another’s pockets, there wasn’t a lot of room for secrecy. Davey’s face flickered in front of his eyes, and he chanced a look over at Jack. Ah. He finished up the phrase, correctly this time. Don’t want Davey to see.

He braced his hands under himself, fingertips pressing through the grating, and tucked his crutch into the crook of his elbow. The morning was growing bright.

“You don’t gotta be okay,” Crutchie said. “You just gotta try.”

He stood, pulling himself up on the railing, and Jack’s head lolled back to keep an eye on his face as he rose. Crutchie graced a smile down at him. The paperbag swung heavy and full against the back of his hip.

“So what we’re gonna do,” he said, taking in the slow refocusing of Jack’s dark eyes. “Is get you a hot shower and a bowl of soup from Jacobi.” Jack blinked, just once. “And then you can go to bed.”

He offered a hand, palm open, and waited for Jack to pull himself up. There was a long pause. He wiggled his fingers. Slowly, very slowly, Jack reached up, bypassing his hand in favor of a climber’s hold. Crutchie leaned to balance Jack’s weight, frowning to himself when it seemed less than usual. Two bowls of soup.

Jack stood excruciatingly slowly, but he stood.

Crutchie could just catch the edge of Columbus Park over the brick ridges of the next building, Jojo bothering some pigeons near a fountainhead as he hawked his papers to sleepy passersby. Water from yesterday’s storm lay slick over everything, bending all the heads of the park plants downward and soaking the bootsoles of everyone on the street. A carriage rattled past, kicking up spray that made Jojo jump.

Crutchie ducked his head down, blinking through the grate beneath their feet, before popping his eyes back up, scraping a knuckle against the side of his nose. Things would be okay. Maybe not right now. But soon.

“First, though,” Crutchie said, doing everything in his power to make it seem like it wasn't any kind of order at all. “You gotta help me down the ladder.”


End file.
